Hi guys, suddenly two weeks had past and its time for another reflection. In today's reflection I will be focusing about the various group presentations, my thoughts about them and some personal suggestions.
  Firstly though, I want to congratulate myself for getting used to the CDE style of learning, which is constant reading and doing projects at home while we discuss what we learnt in class. This style of learning was very different from that of other subjects but now that I got used to it, it is actually beneficial to use different types of learning styles to reduce stress.
  In cooperation with our learning of the difference between the East and the West and the different cultures of digital titans like Google and Apple, we divided into groups to do a project. Each group is to research on a brand or company that achieved great success in China but only have limited success internationally, what are the causes of this and some suggestions to break through the international market barrier. Each group is supposed to use Google and Apple as model examples by stating how each company can learn from these two internationally successful titans. Furthermore, each group has to show the ability to link why the company is successful or not to  internationally to cultural factors. Some of the companies chosen are lining, tebu, Lenovo and our group's company, wexin.
  After finishing all the presentations in a few lessons, here are some of my personal takeaways and impressions. Firstly, it is commendable that each group put in great effort in their project as every group can summarise why their respective company succeeded in China but not in the globe and each group gave new and realistic suggestions to help the company to break into the international markets. For example, follow the working schedule of Google to improve productivity of workers, increasing the price so as to show confidence in its own products and to employ a foreign talent that is known and respected in a region to help to publicise and market products to external regions. However, not the whole class is involved in the learning process and thus the knowledge that each group presented is not spread around the class. I experienced this first hand when I saw classmates not paying attention when our group is presenting and me myself being very sleepy during the last two group presentations. I understand that this phenomenon is inevitable as our presenters are not professional and the listeners are not actively engaged in this one sided monologue. Thus I suggest putting the presentation in debate form. Take the two groups working on lining and tebu for example, since both are sport equipment brands, they are similar and can be used for comparison. By letting both groups present together in a debate fashion, the rest of the class can compare the different methods the companies used to break into the international market and gauge how successful each company is relatively. This way of presenting also encourages the audience to become active and speak out their views, adding on to the learning, achieving win-win. Secondly, I feel that each group has stated plenty of reasons why the Chinese companies have limited success in international markets, however, only a minority of the reasons are related to the difference between two cultures. Personally, I think that the difference in cultures plays a huge part in whether a Chinese company can break into external markets successfully. Take for example the fact that the Chinese prefer low price products while the Americans prefer high quality products. Since Americans tend to regard low price products as low quality products, cheap Chinese phones, despite having great designs and functionality, is not welcomed in America because the low price tags encourages Americans to think the phone to be of low quality and the brand to have little confidence in themselves. They would rather spend the money of several Chinese phones to buy themselves an iPhone, simply because of the brand and the confidence it has in its customers. Thus cultural differences is an important factor and should be paid more attention to.
  After reviewing all the presentations, I realise that despite how different each company is, they face similar challenges in breaking through the foreign market, namely low popularity as in the people who know this brand from other countries, strong international competitors that are popular and the lack of a good way to market and publicise the products. Such as the topic for our group weixin, who faces the nearly insurmountable obstacle of WhatsApp and claims that the Chinese government will use the personal information of foreign users. By reflecting on these main issues, I think the main challenges for these Chinese companies are trust and popularity. Chinese companies need to be clear that they stand apart from the government and will protect the privacy of its customers so as to develop trust, which can then progress to popularity. And as for popularity, my personal advice is that the companies should not focus on suddenly invade the whole international market, as the spread will strain their resources and attention. Instead, they should start small by developing unwavering popularity in each region first, and slowly the popularity and trust of the companies will increase naturally.
  And that's the end of the presentations and reflection, I have learnt tremendously from this and hope you do too. Thank you.

!Not part of actual blog!--First I shall thank everyone for take his time to read my blog. I shall also apologize here for uploading my blog late due to medical reasons—Haotian

  

  As you can see from the title, this blog is about Cultural Differentiation Elective(CDE), which studies how the western and eastern cultures differ and relate to each other. I am new to CDE as it is only introduced to us this year, but in two lessons, I am fascinated by it. The CDE module makes its objectives super clear as it focuses on using case studies of the different aspects on the two cultures to compare and contrast. This give us a platform to study this differences, and discuss what resulted in this differences(social, believe in freedom etc.), which I understand as studying the bigger picture from a smaller example. I also understand how CDE is important to Singaporeans, especially those like me in the Bilingual Special Program, because if we cannot even identify how the differences and similarities between the western culture and the eastern cultures, we cannot be scholars that excel in both cultures. Thus, my goal for CDE this year will be to have a clear grasp of how the East is different from the West, and how this will affect the way each people do things and think in their own nations.

  

  I shall conclude my first lesson as an amazing appetitser. By watching HSBC commercial videos, I learnt how the lack of knowledge of other cultures can result in awkward situations(sometimes even damaging to your wallet and your personal image.) It reinforces the idea of the power that cultures and deep-rooted traditions can have. For me, it also give me a question to ponder: that is understanding the culture of place you are going to important, no matter what reasons you are going there for? After a short time of internal brain-storming and analysis, I decided that it is favorable to learn about the culture of the place you are visiting or going for a vacation as the extra information can give you a more enjoyable time there. But it is essential to understand about the place you are travelling to for business and its culture, since displaying a good knowledge of the culture and help you to build up a good image of yourself in your future business partner while a lack of knowledge will leave a long-lasting mark of disrespect in the opposite party’s minds, which may even endanger your deal.

  

  During our second lesson, we studied about the Core American Values that determined how Americans think and how America works. I learnt that America is consisted of a pluralistic society, which is evident in its fifty states and represent various social values. According to “The American Way” by Sociologist R. Williams, America is – about individualism; emphasizes on success and active engagement in any activity; values efficiency and practicality; passionate about science and technology; demands progress and materialistic comfort; is a Humanitarian nation; and ironically being a nation that is racist and view some other races as inferior although America almost being a synonym for freedom, democracy and equality. Other aspects that people relates to when thinking of America is religiosity and romantic love. Such is the basic information I was taught but through guidance from Mr. Karplus and some discussion, I can infer from the information and learn even more. For example I learnt how the different American Core Values are inter-connected, like the value on practicality causing America to be interested in applied science and how the demand for progress result in technology in America to rapidly develop. Also I understood how the values affect America in their way of thinking and doing things, such as many American’s opposition to the abolishment of gun ownership partly due to thinking that their “freedom” is being violated and many American movies having only one hero who is infallible and capable of everything due to America’s individualism(大英雄主义). Lastly, I have some personal views on the subject of America being racist and the whites viewing themselves as superior: this maybe partially due to the whites is not natives of the land of America and thus had a desire to show that they are the rightful rulers of this plot of land, being racist to people to other races(native Indies) so as to gather self confidence. And this marks the end of the second lesson.